@mxyzplk Unfortunately, it seems I cannot even do as you requested (You cannot edit this question because it was deleted). I still feel is a good question, so I am asking you on how to proceed...
@doppelgreener I'm curious what you'd think of my amended response: "I could look this up in an hour on paper, therefore you didn't do your research." I still feel that level of effort is reasonable to expect, but I'm wondering if I'm on the other side of a cultural divide from others.
@Mala If that was the issue, you also could have asked me.
@Mala So, then, this is where I think we have an honest and reasonable disagreement: you think an hour reading spell descriptions when one wants to play a caster is non-trivial, where I think it is. Fair?
@Mala I don't understand, but there's a two-decade gap in playstyle-evolution where I didn't participate and things like "build" perhaps gained connotations I don't appreciate.
@doppelgreener I'm just wondering whether my internal "bar" for what's a reasonable amount to ask from the querent is too high. I don't think an hour's flipping through spell descriptions is a big ask.
@Mala if there are things in your original lightning/thunder question that would have required one read the spells multiple times, then I totally missed that.
I stand by my previous claim. Asking for something that a user with better experience might have interiorized is asking for someone to do a trivial effort instead of the querent making a big effort. Asking for someone to skim through a book in your stead looks like a lazy thing to do . and should it take 5 days, it would still reek of low effort to me
@Mala But none of that was in the question. If that context matters--"I need this answer quicker than the hour it'd take me to generate"--then possibly that needed to be part of the question.
I have the same problem in 4e and I found an useful solution to be "just let them take the OP route, then complain if challenging them is too hard". It doesn't work really well, but at least I'm in peace with my mind :p
@Zachiel Mostly this, but if it takes someone else two [time units] instead of you five [same units], because they know the organization of the material and therefore can skim-read better than you do, case 2 reverts to case 1, which makes it hard in general to decide a priori.
@nitsua60 seems straightforward research yeah. I'd expect this to hit main site if that wasn't working in giving me an answer. I spend hours or days researching things personally when I can - I ask a stack exchange site when I can't or I'm stuck.
@Mala on your most recent meta, your premise strikes me as flawed. Piracy's a red herring, because it's not the only way to achieve what I did. Scanning one's own and Fantasy Grounds are legal alternatives. It may still be reasonable to ask your meta about where the line for "shows effort" lies.
I assume that was because (a) he sees an on-topic question there, (b) no matter how you edit the now-deleted one it'd never lose the history of the last 12 hours, which he thinks are detrimental to it.
You should all step back from this for a while I think. Tensions are high. People are frustrated. Go enjoy your Sundays or whatever it is there. Get some rest. Watch a movie.
I'm cool. Not frustrated, but I'll admit that I spend an our in church this morning preoccupied by the thought "why did I even mention how long it took?" I regretted that from the moment I woke up, because I could see it dragging all sorts of unrelated issues into the discourse.
We handle issues like this over days but you're apparently seeking to resolve it within hours, we can't necessarily do that. A mod left to do his own thing and isn't available to advise you right now. Other users have things to do too.
Also, not properly ordered (wizard/cleric is only available from the list, which doesn't have a page number for spells, not in the actual spell descriptions)
RPG.SE does not provide copyrighted material for legal reasons. Sometimes we quote minor passages from relevant books under fair use.
Also, we are very reluctant to have any questions that need regular maintenance. Sometimes it happens it is required (e.g. rule change or errata) but if we can foresee changes, we don't answer.
It;s a very specific website - one that provides expertise (not knowledge) to specific questions.
There are places that do other things, like e.g. Reddit never shied away from high-maintenance data warehousing, but they also don't give a rat's ass about IP.
But asking me to change things, me investing the time, then saying generally "stuff is still wrong" without actually telling me what when I ask multiple times what specifically is wrong...
Just answering in generalities when I beg them to tell me specifically what is the problem...
@Baskakov_Dmitriy I'll admit, I'm not seeing much objectionable. Two things do stand out to me: (a) in the first lines you encourage denying a player their agency, which is strongly taboo for many people; (b) at the end you say you didn't read all the answers, which might put off some voters. Personally I don't find either of those downvote-worthy, but they each raise an eyebrow.
This is what happened: nitsua motivated a downvote on a question by Mala by saying that Mala had asked something so trivial it could be found in the manuals in 6 minutes. (not enough effort) Mala made a confrontational question that was half "wow, six minutes, how?" and half "I think you're basing your 6 minutes on using illegal material, which I won't use." Nitsua kept the downvote, for different reasons, but admitted the time was not that relevant. Meanwhile, mxy closed the second question because it made unnecessary references to the first one. We went great lenghts to explain Mala that …
@Baskakov_Dmitriy Especially the first thing nitsua said
@Baskakov_Dmitriy Also, you seem to try to solve a social problem at the table (we decided we want to play murderous cretins" with in-game punishment or in-game retconning, which many people believe to be a passive-aggressive way of solving problems better addressed elsewhere
@Zachiel That matches up with the bits I'd managed to piece together by now. But that doesn't sound like your fault. That sounds like Mala continuing the same pattern of confrontation and escalation that they started yesterday.
If the community and individuals go to “great lengths” to try to help someone and their response is to freak out more, I think it's fair to say that the responsibility lies with the person who is, for whatever reason, failing to keep their calm.
@Zachiel It's not your fault. In fact, I think your point on "how hard it is to grasp" is likely the best contribution to discourse that's been made in the last 16 hours.
So there was this guy who went to a baseball game. He got his drink and some popcorn and was getting comfy. The game was just starting to get interesting when he heard someone shout "Hey Steve!" He turns around and scans the crowd behind him, but he can't see who shouted.
He said that he was really enjoying a mundane contemporary setting where we used Facebook and bicycles instead of gravity guns and spaceships to solve our problems.
He settles back in, and focuses on the game. There's an epic home run being attempted when somebody behind him shouts “Hey Steve!” He whips around, but can't see who shouted. And he missed the close call on the diamond.
This happens twice more; someone shouts “Hey Steve!” and he can't see who's shouting. Finally, it happens a fifth time: “Hey Steve!” and he whips around, stands up, and shouts “MY NAME'S NOT STEVE!”
That's my one joke. I'm terrible at remembering jokes. ;)
@BESW I had that at the beginning of my last big campaign too; hunters in a clan in a part of Glorantha that was pretty wild. The players really liked the drama of just hunting, the weather, and aspiring to status in the clan. It was an interesting change of pace.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy I never played Vampires proper. I played WoD, both old and new, and some games of Werewolves, and Wraith, and a friend had me read the manual of Changeling once. I played the computer game (the old one, the one that starts in the old ages and you're a Brujah) and I recently played a Lady Blackbird hack with the V:tM setting
The whole situation with that guy, Mala, actually made me think which question is good if you reduct rules to the absurd. If the answer to your question is somewhere in the book, you have to buy it and read it yourself. If there is no book which contains the answer, you can't ask the question because it will be opinion-based.
So the only question that is not against the rules is "Which book, if any, has the description of X?", and most if not all other questions need to be closed or even removed.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy That's not really useful, because reducing rules to absurdity definitionally makes them absurd by removing the caveats and details which make them work.
@nitsua60 It may be better in person. It's the whole lead-up, making a big deal of the setup, and then the punchline is that the irritated guy is doing something ridiculous.
(eg, conflating "too opinion based" with "opinion based" is a common early-user misunderstanding, but the nuance between them is vital to the site's operation.)
@Baskakov_Dmitriy Keep in mind that “question shows no effort” isn't a reason to close a question, just to (maybe) downvote. So it doesn't say anything about what questions are or aren't OK for the site.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy Yeah, there's a massive difference between down voting and close voting, which means my typo on the star bar has been annoying me for two days.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy However, we do expect that people have at least tried to solve their own problem. Lazily posting a question here asking us to do work that they obviously just don't want to do themself can sometimes get closed as “what is the actual problem? closing as unclear”.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy I, personally, have two lines in my head that often come into play when thinking about D&D questions: (a) does it require rules from several places to understand, (b) is it hard to understand if you didn't already have D&D experience coming in?
I don't have to be absolutely positive in order to cast a down-vote; otherwise I almost never would. Four other people have to agree with me, so I can act knowing that if I'm wrong there's a buffer.
@BESW Welcome! You can also flag things like that (using the flag for moderator option) with a custom explanation of the need. (It's no bother either; it's nice to get easy, non-everything-is-on-fire flags to handle.)
@Baskakov_Dmitriy in the (a) case, I find it can be really hard to remember which rules from scattered across a couple of books can apply in a given situation; if the rules for something aren't all found on one page I'll assume it's a complicated "enough" question.
In the (b) case I'll just say that no edition's PHB has ever struck me as being possible to read and comprehend at first blush without having first understood a previous version's. (And I'm including ODD, there!) So I'm fairly sympathetic to "I'm making my first character, what the heck is this?" questions, where this is something that's going to be explained in a single paragraph rule 150 pages later.
@nitsua60 I'm also very fond of the kind of shaggy dog story which ends in an extended... I'm not sure what it's called, where you take a well-known line and say words which sound similar but have a totally different meaning.
@nitsua60 I would probably add that it should also be unclear where to search about this. For example, regarding VtM (I don't know much about other settings), you would be surprised that there is no place in a corebook where damage of explosive weapons is given.
So, for example, if a character is hit by a grenade explosion, you will have to improvise unless you have read Vampire: The Masquerade Storyteller's Companion, page 65. I actually plan to post this question myself and answer it when I read the book. Of course, it is wise for the Storyteller to read it before GMing, but it is more than OK to miss it for some reason.
However, before asking a question about where does the Danislav revenant family come from and how did it appear, I am trying to search the approproate sources. Didn't find an answer yet, though.
@BESW And fair enough! I've had to deal with a similar reluctance with “bugging” the CMs about things that feel small, and had to hear the same advice before I felt like it was OK to bring things to them that weren't on fire. ;)
@nitsua60 Hopefully, VtM isn't as scattered as D&D. However, differences between editions are very minor, so people are unprepared to find them. I had a very long and passionate argument with a veteran (that's important) WoD player, and we both used "I have seen it in the rulebook!" argument.
Only to find out that I was talking about V20 and he was talking about the Revised edition.
So it became a no less passionate argument about which edition is better, Revised or V20.
@nitsua60 There's a bank teller named Patricia, who is very good at her job. She's especially good at remaining professional when the customers are being super weird. So when a frog comes into the bank one day, all the other tellers vanish and he walks up to Patricia.
"Good afternoon sir, how can I help you?" "Hello Miss..." the frog squints at her name card "...Wack, my name is Kermit Jagger (I'm the son of Mick Jagger) and I'd like to take out a loan for ten million dollars." "That's a lot of money, Mr. Jagger. Do you have any collateral for the loan?"
"Of course!" The frog puts a small pink plastic elephant on the counter. "There you go." "Hmm. This is rather unusual, sir. May I show it to my manager?" "Please do, I'm in no hurry."
@nitsua60 Yeah, we're reasonably tolerant of completely novice questions. It's the “read the book” questions that aren't caused by being a novice that tend to kick over the wasp nest.
So Patricia goes into the back and finds her manager. "Sir, there's a frog out there. He says he's the son of Mick Jagger, he wants a ten million dollar loan, and he gave me this for collateral." She hands him the elephant. "Sir, what IS that?"
The manager looks at the elephant, looks at Patricia, and looks at the frog waiting patiently at the counter.
Heisenberg is driving Schrödinger and Ohm down the highway when a cop pulls him over for speeding. Cop: "Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg: "No, but I can tell you exactly where we are."
Well, the cop finds that sort of suspicious so he decides to look in the truck. "...did you know you have a dead cat in here?" Schrödinger throws his hands in the air. "I do now!"
After more lip of this sort, the cop decides to take them all down to the station, but Ohm resists.
Speaking of laughs, I almost died laughing last week on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Literally. I'd just taken a bite of a sandwich when Bobcat Goldthwait started telling a story about performing at a Juggalos festival; all while Robin Williams was providing color-commentary. I've got my jaws uber-clenched to keep from choking, hyperventilating/laughing through my nose-which-doesn't-provide-enough-airflow, tears streaming down my face as I try to keep the car in its lane. All I could think was "my wife's going to kill me if I die here, like this."
(Anyone who isn't familiar, here's everything I know about the Juggalos, filtered through the even-more-absurd-than-the-Juggalos-themselves pursual of their fans as domestic terrorists by the FBI.)
Anyway, I know one guy who didn't read the source material yet, so I'm not going to explain things further and I won't post links. Gareth, I hope you don't read this.
@NiekBergman I'll tell you, check out Harmontown (podcast) episode 51, "Bikers Without Bikes," 4/7/13, at about 14:40; for the rest of your life ICP and Juggalos will just strike you as the funniest thing....
@Baskakov_Dmitriy I suspect that's getting downvotes because people disagree that it's a workable solution. It might work in Vampire, but that's because the basic theme of VtM is the struggle between Humanity and the Beast, but that character struggle isn't part of D&D or part of the question. The problem is players choosing to play a certain way, and voters think that the DM saying “don't do that unless you make a DC 25 Will save” won't solve the problem of the players and DM wanting different things.
